Blame the Weather

(Originally Published in On the Level, the magazine of the BMW Riders Association.)

We Californians can be annoyingly smug about our 12-month riding season. We’ve read about things called gas stabilizers and battery chargers, but we don’t really know how to use them. We listen with empathy when riders in the Midwest and New England speak of those first, joyous rides of spring, when the bike gets fired up after months of dormancy. But that ain’t us. In California, it’s always spring!

Until this year. My riding buddy Ken measured 67 inches of rain at his house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. All the best roads were ravaged by potholes and fissures, and closures were everywhere. Most of the trails at the local OHV park were off limits. All this chaos produces prolific whining and hyperventilating from formerly smug Californians—like myself. It’s been a sad spectacle.

So, given the calamitous situation, and confined to the house for much of the winter, I did what any reasonable person of a certain age would do: I bought another motorcycle.

Wherein Geoff Succumbs to a Familiar Obsession

Every evening, I am spelunking down long, dark tunnels of old bike websites. The more it rains,  the deeper I burrow into the hopeless rabbit holes of eBay Motors, Bring a Trailer, Cycle Trader, and Craigslist. My wife can see the coming crapfest from a mile away, but views it with a sense of resignation. So I press on. By February I am getting four e-mails per day from my saved searches, displaying mostly decrepit Frankenbikes of the early ‘70s (my special weakness).  “Kawasaki H1! No title! Ran when parked (in 1981)!”  “Hodaka Combat Wombat, missing piston!” “Suzuki Titan, painted orange with rattle can, no front wheel!” I love them all, and feel myself weakening in the face of such a bounty of basket cases.

Then, on Craigslist, I spy The One: a red, 1975 Honda CB400F. You know, the model with the seductive, swoopy four-into-one exhaust. This bike served as Honda’s apology for the woefully underpowered and portly CB 350 Four that was introduced in ‘72. In contrast to the ponderous 350, the 400 had six speeds, low bars, and an athletic, café racer stance. It’s as if Soichiro Honda said, “Okay, we know the 350 Four wasn’t our best effort. Try this instead!” To add emphasis, the company included one of the best-looking exhausts in the history of motorcycling (says me).

My friend Todd and I pick one of the few clear days of February to ride over the Santa Cruz Mountains and see the bike. The seller throws open the garage door to reveal not one but two CB400Fs, as well as a 1974 CB450, and boxes of NOS parts stacked like cordwood. Valhalla!

The owner, a Japanese gentleman named Yuki, bows respectfully when we arrive, as if to add bona fides to the whole transaction. (I’ve always thought bowing to be a far more elegant greeting than the traditional germ exchange known as a handshake.)

Overall the little Honda looks great. And from a distance, it’s spectacular. There are the usual faults: The previous owner bought a lot of new parts, but not all of them were installed perfectly. (The new chain, for instance, is tight as a piano wire.) Someone also seems to have gone at a few parts with black brush paint after drinking a six of beer, so I’m thinking there’s some paintwork in my future. But overall, it’s an alluring bike that makes lovely music when I take it around the neighborhood.

On the way home, in a more sober moment, I begin to count all the ways this motorcycle is pointless for me:

• No load carrying capacity.
• No passenger carrying capability.
• A frenetic, high-strung engine not suited to long distances.
• It’s almost 50 years old, which means repairs will be constant and inevitable.

And of course, I have no place to put the thing. My garage is already a kind of two-wheeled Rubik’s Cube that contains five motorcycles (with associated parts boxes), 10 bicycles, a hydraulic lift, toolboxes, and a small compressor. Somewhere in there is my wife’s car. You cannot bend over or outstretch your arms without suffering puncture wounds or grease stains.

But these are rational arguments that have no place in the alternative universe of motorcycle intoxication that I live in. Within hours, we agree on a price, and the bike is mine.

The Journey Begins

The seller wants me to drive over our local mountain range to pick it up the little red bike in my open trailer, on one of the worst days of the year. In my mind I envision the trailer, with the new-to-me vintage motorcycle sitting prettily on top, sliding off into a ravine, only to be found decades later by a vintage motorcycle enthusiast who happened to be geocaching or running from the police, as we are wont to do.

Instead, on the next clear day, Yuki offers to drive it over in his van. He unloads the bike, we complete the necessary paperwork, and I fire it up. The little pan pipes make wonderful music, just as I remember. I spin it around my cul de sac before putting it up on the lift stand to begin the requisite new-used-bike service: oil, filters, plugs, timing, and carb sync.

Of all my bikes, the CB400F gets an A-plus in what I call the Garage Mobility Scale. It’s easy to move around, put up on the lift stand, and has a center stand that a child could operate, making it simple to wedge the bike into improbable spaces that I would never attempt with my corpulent, 525-pound, BMW R1200GS.

And thus begins the familiar, joyful process: I am finding websites devoted to Honda four-cylinder parts, with evocative names like Yamiya, 4 into1, and SOHC 4 Shop. I’m also consulting the oracle (internet forums), asking questions like:  Why do my carbs leak? How do you silence a rattling cam chain? How do I fix a broken fork stop? And so on. Hurl your question into the interclouds, and answers come back as if by magic.

The restoration process seems vaguely familiar, from when I restored another SOHC Honda a few years back (1974 Honda CB750). Sadly, I threw away all the paperwork associated with that restoration, having declared, in an impressive gesture of finality, that I would never restore another vintage bike. “Just the new stuff for me!” I declared forcefully. “No more “old crocks”! as my mechanic friend Tom likes to call them. Obviously, that promise landed on the refuse pile with all the other vows I have made to save money, learn a foreign language, take up a musical instrument, and only do prudent things. Instead of bettering myself in any of these ways, I have a 48-year-old Honda up on the lift, in need of service. Go figure.

Parts boxes arrive daily. Even the UPS man looks at me with a kind of hopeless and pitying gaze. I envision him going home to his wife at night and saying, “You can’t believe this guy! He bought another one!”

I’m also rediscovering the social joy of having a vintage bike: whenever I go out, old codgers come wondering over, like a scene from “Night of the Living Dead,” and proceed to get all weepy over the little red bike, regaling me with stories of hyper-legal, midnight sorties on (fill-in-the-blank) old motorcycle that they had in their 20s and wish they’d never sold.

But best of all, the little Honda passes the requisite test of all vintage motorcycles: it looks spectacular up on the lift, late at night, with a fermented beverage in hand. For all these things: the pointless and impractical little motorcycle, the marital strife, the depleted bank account, the overstuffed garage—I blame the weather.